I performed on stage when nearly nine months pregnant, (though my baby threatened to upstage me, and the crowd could see him wriggling).

I did jury service with a baby only months old, I did script read-throughs with a month old breast feeding baby, (pop the table cloth over their face so they can relax), I went to the TVNZ awards with a three month old baby, (those days). I made another short film. I continued to perform, with a young breastfeeding baby, carrying him up to the microphone at readings, where sometimes he joined in, I made a 240-minute documentary film, as the mother of a 1, 2 and 3 year old (just the one child, -it took three years), having separated and living without support or any funds, I directed theatre productions and events, writing designing and taking all roles let’s see, 1, 2, 3, 4, of them. I ran a legal case over the course of 4-5 years to preserve my custody rights and subsequently I became an advocate for women going through the family court. I made a film about the occupy movement with a two-year-old in tow. I put my name at the helm of the protests to forge awareness about the corruption behind post office closures also with a two-year-old in tow, and made an address to the commerce committee, and put a petition to gov’t and made and collated all the media, to the extent of sometimes delivering the media to the publishers. I fought off the persecutory demands of the governmental agencies and pointed out where they were failing the public and fed this information back to advocacy and activist organizations. I pursued a second medico-legal process over the course of the entire decade which meant an exploration of the medical world, I battled for my legal rights in this regard to be taken seriously, and put the foundation together for a case. I did a dip grad degree in education with a 5 then 6-year-old at the time. Others will have their own list. Mine is inconclusive. And for me that was all without the income and support team of a government official, and with no money and no partner,( often having to walk (or run, or bike ) everywhere, or ask for community support), -the hindrances of those without income. -so, I think Jacinda’s role as leader of the government with a substantial ‘village’ around her plus Clarke, plus as much paid help as she needs, – is going to be perfectly fine.

But this is what women do, women have babies and they do stuff.

Let’s start looking at the infrastructure around the workplace and early childhood as inhibitors to women who are otherwise perfectly capable and willing to get on with their lives: archaic draconian systems that inhibit and oppress women who have children.

A system that uses women’s natural state as the agent for reproduction as an oppressive tool against the potential for women to have an equal status in society as anyone else, needs to be altered in this day and age.

SO let’s look again at how women are treated in the workplace who become mothers, who are NOT Jacinda Adern, and let’s not acquiesce to futile petty encounters with those winkers who like to keep a negative focus on her, she’s fine. Other women in New Zealand are not, yet.

So, as we all get used to the pregnancy, and the child that follows, can we please refrain from falling into a state of total tabloid adoration, but allow the inferences to unfold in a way that changes infrastructure at a level that really benefits women who are otherwise not given as many options, or who are vulnerable to having their options taken from them on account of their being women who have children. Let’s also consider those women for whom the option of even having a child is controlled by circumstances outside of their personal influence.P.S. I have already congratulated Jacinda on her pregnancy along with several thousand others. I think it’s great. Many teachers will tell you babies bring a calming and nurturing effect into a classroom, and I should think it will have the same effect in the house and in the corridors of power too.

My companion and I attended the very final night of Matilda the Musical at the Civic in Auckland. And his response was similar to mine, – “Wow! That was Amazing!”Roald Dahl is a hero. His legacy lives on beyond his years as a household name for his brilliance, and hilarious children’s books. But there is something more about Dahl, that some might forget and not the least is his capacity to inspire heroism. This is a show that takes that and runs with it.

The Matilda’s are truly amazing I agree but the entire cast is also so very talented. The younger performers absolutely holding their own as true professionals alongside the adults. It was very difficult not to believe that ‘our’ Matilda was the best even though I hadn’t seen the others, certainly the standing ovation was fulfilled for her curtain call, and well deserved. I found myself ogling at the considerable casting process that must have happened. What a wealth of talented singing and dancing children must be in the UK, to have easily found a whole bunch of exceptional talent. Or maybe kids are just more amazing than we ever give them credit for.

I know it’s unusual to write a review on closing, but I was so delighted at the incarnation of Dahl’s essential stance on the strength and power of children, his respect for them, and his determination that they should be spoken to directly, and taught to think critically, starting with reading. As Tim Minchin has said, “to be a rebel, you’ve got to be smart”.And this is why I am reviewing on closing. It doesn’t matter if you can’t get to see Matilda now but you may get another opportunity, and if you do, then do. Even if like us you have to go without a few necessities for a week or two to make it happen! In case you haven’t guessed though, I come from a Roald Dahl family, happily, I think Matilda was one of the few of his books that I hadn’t actually read. We speak in Dahl-isms and references, across generations, whether it’s the BFG glimpsed out the window, or the desire to deal out a punishment such as one received by the Twits, or the resemblance of certain characters to Boggis Bunce and Bean out of the corner of your eye as you’re driving down the street… Dahl, understood the importance of his role in influencing young minds, and the moral themes of clever children who read, and plan things as opposed to spoilt children who whinge and moan and have everything they want is present throughout his writing career, and many of his works are more suited to older children as well. If your kids are older than 8, they may be interested to look at ‘Danny The Champion of the World’, or the collection of shorts under the title ‘The wonderful story of Henry Sugar’, which has stories that become slightly more suited to older young adults from the beginning of the book to the back, ending with the horrifying and autobiographical story of a fighter pilot being shot from the sky. Maybe some of you didn’t realize that Dahl wrote for adults too, in his ‘Collected Stories’, you will meet more of the adult man’s mind, in his wonderfully filmic short pieces, such as the famous ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’. And there’s no doubt that the stories of Roald Dahls life are equally as interesting if you cared to read up on him.

Quite wonderfully, the main theme of Matilda is that for your own safety, so as not to fall prey to the unsavory evils of the world of controlling grown up people, one ought to learn to read. I had the opportunity to hear Geoffrey Palmer recently speaking on his case for a New constitution for our country, and particularly regarding education. Yes, it is vital that school leavers should have access to some basic education about society’s political structures, and should know for example what democracy is, I for one, am very pleased to see that this kind of thinking will be implemented in the new government’s School leaver’s tool kit. However my response to Palmer, was that while we do indeed need a populace that regains a political literacy, we actually need to remember that primary and secondary education is a pivotal part of forging social change for the better. Before political literacy, we need …literacy. And the fact that the social divide is being created long before students are going to be receiving education for their school leaver’s toolkit, means that toolkit education needs to begin with sewing together the enormous rift that has been created by inequality right through the centre of our mainstream school population. Why is it so vitally important that young New Zealander’s actually have an inquiring mind, instead of their teacher’s ticking the box marked ‘inquiry’ in their lesson planning? Because critical thinking is the difference between a hegemony that is managed with a top down authority (and will eventually give way to an oligarchy), and a democratic hegemonic structure that represents the people and expresses itself on behalf of the people from the bottom up, across the populace. To an uninformed mind, it will be tricky to spot the difference.

Matilda, as a book, and as a musical, speaks precisely to this theme, and warns of the dire consequences. Those social influencers throughout history who were closer to wars that have been levied against the people inside and outside of the British Empire, may just have a more justified backdrop to the warnings they dish out and the moral tales, if they are so inclined, and may deserve being listened to a little more closely.

And Tim Minchin is a hero. For stepping up to the mark, and bringing the musical to life with Matilda not in any way compromised but uplifted in all her extraordinary-little-girl-with-a-moral-code-who-is-a-little-bit-naughty-but-for-the-right-reasons glory.“I think Matilda is an icon, -a feminist icon for informed rebellion, -and she’s also magic… which helps”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClrN5YogqYIHere’s the full interview. But also, Minchin is admitting to wanting to create a Trumpian character in the construct of the Headmistress and Matilda’s awful parents: “I do want to write about Trump, and in fact Matilda has everything I want to say about it, because if you’re watching it as an adult, Mr and Mrs Wormwood [Matilda’s horrid, TV-obsessed parents] and Miss Trunchbull [the authoritarian headmistress of Crunchem Hall school] together form a Trumpian figure – incredibly anti-intellectual.”

So thankyou Tim Minchin, thankyou all the performers, and thankyou Roald Dahl, life would be so much less cool without you in it. And for all those on the right wing side of New Zealand politics who have been expressing their dismay at our new government and its resolve to do right by the people of the country, I decree, less whinging and much more Roald Dahl is in order for you. In the second half of the musical, there is a scene in which Matilda’s teacher breaks with formalities and takes Matilda in for a cup of tea, the set reforms into something that looks like a wooden raft, with a hob for a kettle, “Are you Poor? asks Matilda, cueing a plaintive almost saccharine song from the very darling but distraught Ms Honey:“On this chair I can write my lessons.

One this pillow I can dream my nights away.

And this table as you can see, well, it’s perfect for tea. ..

It isn’t much but it is enough, for me”At which point my companion leaned toward me and whispered very audibly in the direction of my ear,

“Mum! Does it sound familiar?”

We were both moved, horrified and awed by Dahl brought to Epic proportions in front of us. What a thrill.

I would vote for the party that holds the ticket to equal opportunities education in a way that no other party can match.

Our children are our future.

Young school leavers are currently facing a hopeless outlook, and it does not take more than a few life hurdles for kids from the affluent sectors on this land to join them.

Our schools must harbour an education system that prepares all individuals to join the world of the living. Not to become a contingency of poverty and hopelessness, propping up and dying by the crime syndicates that are led by well-connected importers.

Not so long ago I phoned a guy, he was a life coach. I googled him, and phoned him up. How the hell was I going to get out of the catch 22 I was in with high rent on a house falling into a state of disrepair, a stretched benefit income, an ACC battle, a shared custody arrangement, and never enough to make ends meet no matter how resourceful I was…

This guy on the end of the phone explained to me, that he had inherited a farm, and his business was largely received information, -that changed his life, but that he mostly worked for people in similar circumstances to himself. It was a big deal to have to consider selling your late father’s farm, and have a change of lifestyle… He seemed to concede that he had very little to offer me. And then we talked about suicide.

I talked about the arts community. How it didn’t strike poor or rich people in particular, but that while everyone was so stretched by property prices, and by funding for public services being pulled everywhere… people are less able to be there for their friends, less able to be there for each other in any kind of circumstance… wedding or funeral.

So, he turned it around to suggest that I was living in a luxury of a big house in Grey Lynn. I forgive him. It was probably hard for him to concede that he was a ‘life coach’ just for people with capital.

My son sleeps in the sunroom off my room, or with me. I have one flatmate in his old room, and if I were to lease the living room as a bedroom, – because the rent is so high, my living costs after the adjustment of my accommodation allowance would stay the same… not enough. I’m now using the space to work from as I transition into a sustainable self-employment.

I steered the conversation back to his community, and he softened as he talked about suicide in the rural community. “These guys get isolated…”

I can imagine it, I have in my childhood, edged around the farming world via parent’s friends, friends’ parents, family.

It was a strange two-hour conversation that led to what we both have in common. A concern for friends and colleagues, a social conscience, and a desire to help people better themselves in a way that knits together hopefully for all.

But there was no life coach, budgeting advisor or bank that could help me for eight years living below the expected survival threshold. And my kind friends will remember the year I pleaded for help online when I was ill. A devastating and humbling experience that brought me to tears of gratitude for a week. Weeks.

It shouldn’t have had to take so long, and a social intervention for me to get on my feet.

We need preventative measures that should stop people becoming entrapped by the Ministry of Social Development, and unable to make any progress in the way that happened to me. The way things are going, the shared information about people from kindergarten-age is going to be open to interpretation in a way that will make it nigh on impossible to escape from the snowballing effect of pathologizing likelihoods. Telling anyone you were on a benefit immediately creates a certain profiling. Privacy! Privacy exists for good reason, other than just the fact that what goes on under our rooves should be private! Privacy allows us personally to undertake the virtuous path of being better than we were before, without repercussions of our past lives haunting us.

We want society to get better, but an invasive surveillance and data collection system such as the PRI, make it difficult for individuals to better themselves.

I was humiliated in the WINZ office. I was joked about loudly between staff members and refused food grants when I needed them. I was brought to tears several times. The accusation was that I was “milking it”. I overheard people saying that I “had no shame” – there was a culture in my Winz office that I was for some reason not there from necessity. I had to become ill before I was allowed a food grant. I had to beg for assistance with the car, so I could maintain the custody arrangement. “We get all types in here” is what the reps will say if you cry, and if you say, “But you can’t do that!” and thump the table… They will call the security guards over and write on your file that you were ‘abusive’.

My doctor said to me, – you have these degrees, you are capable and clever, why are you still on a benefit…

I said, I am suffering from a considerable injury as a result of treatment, and I need it to be taken seriously. My landlord also puts the rent up each year, and I have to fulfil a court appointed custody agreement. Sometimes I don’t have enough for food or petrol, but to change my circumstances, I would have to give up my son, and I’m not prepared to do that.

Next time I went to the doctor’s, that particular doctor’s books were full.

She didn’t have room for me any longer.

There must be so many people now who as I have been, have the education and yet cannot move, or who are ready and willing to get through their school years despite trouble at home, only to find the teachers have no comprehension of their struggle. There must be many otherwise productive and capable people, weakened by simple stark hunger whether they sit in a house or on a doorstep as you read this.

I understand why people thought I was lying, but not many people would live on nothing for as long as I did to keep a rental in Grey Lynn. Mainly I didn’t want to go too far away and risk losing custody, but also, for some years there, there is no way I could have afforded a truck, and a bond, and so on, and the vulnerability of my financial situation was very real when you consider the housing climate. Also, many people are just not as resourceful as I had to be. I went without food, or ate for example, borage, and onion bulbs and bamboo from the garden at the end of one hard winter, while giving 90% of my income to the landlord, as well as continuously encouraging him to provide safe and hygienic upkeep on the house. I should provide the recipe! I made sure my child had a reasonable lunch box, getting into the habit of rising early to bake simple Anzac biscuits or whatever. Baking is a luxury for many, but the Edmonds cook book is based on wartime and depression standards after all.

Anyway, mostly I wasn’t begging a doctor to see me for free, or at the scrapyard trying to source a wheel for my car for under $40, or op-shopping for curtains so we could have privacy at night after living in the same house for four years, etc…….. and the stigma and the nasty comments, and the sense of falling in society, and the fear that you’ll fall further, which no doubt makes people vulnerable again…. and the other people who think you must be cheating them…

The problem? Is in people’s perception. Also in their empathy, or lack of it. And the lack of critical thinking throughout our populace. Why don’t some people have an inquiring mind? There’s a nature / nurture argument here. But I believe it starts early, and that overall an inquiring mind is one of the natural gifts of life that we are born with. What happens to it?

Why isn’t it clear to so many that education is like planting a social garden, -or crop, for agriculturalists! What will it take for the many people who want to do right by all people to understand that education is the basis by which our future is created.

Early education specifically needs to be free and supportive. Early school leavers are also a risk group. Giving them a channel by which that can feel that they are navigating a pathway into life will not only help them for that year, it will save their lives.

Most high school students are focussed on exams, and it seems that knowledge of social policy, is not for them. However even an understanding of basic democracy and the meaning of the word, has been absent from the curriculum, and so remains untaught. In some schools, you can study a history of Britain’s royal family, – I think it’s fascinating myself, but there is no offer to study our political spectrum in a way that is relevant to young people entering society.

Reductionist thinking is dangerous, it’s dangerous in education, it’s dangerous in the medical world, and it’s dangerous in social policy. We need specialists, we need those very highly trained people, but they need to be well rounded, or else surrounded by people who have more diverse training albeit less specialized than theirs.

Of course, schools i.e.: everyone… meaning people, must have a state provided teaching of social dynamic; the meanings of the words democracy; the meaning of the word diversity; yes, it can remain politically neutral, and that’s the hassle, but for it not to be there, is not politically neutral.

The huge problem we have with a tendency to blame others is completely about this. A lack of knowledge. And it’s beyond funny. Our infrastructure is in a hostage situation, to continue the allegory, we are pleading with them to let the women and children out… It would be better if we could have all our people safe… But our children are our future. They are the future. They deserve to be able to have an education. In this country, we have always been so proud of our social policy. The danger is to segregate social policy from fiscal policy from education and military… this mechanical approach to governance has been a hijacking, but it will always be a dysfunctional governance if it does not consider the synergies of melded societal aspects.

The fact is that these days, both Paula Bennet and Metiria Turei, would NOT have been able to get off the dole. Surveillance and a new militancy in the Welfare system, is exacting and precise and it doesn’t let people defraud it.

Their system of punishment, and threatening, and avoiding giving people opportunities to better themselves is pre-emptive, and they treat all beneficiaries as though they were defrauding the government by receiving a benefit.

WINZ effectively stops people from getting off the dole.

This attitude has got to stop.

Time and time again I have been told by people who think they know it’s true, that the dole ‘disincentivises’ people from getting work.

This way of speaking is a polite way of expressing the same sentiment of disdain. It doesn’t ‘discincentivise’ you need to learn, it actually stops people from bettering their circumstances by limiting their capacity to escape.

When it comes down to it, most welfare money goes directly back to housing NZ and private landowners.

The small remainder gets used to survive, and gradually families, and none more so than solo parents, -usually mums, get ground down until they are operating without a car, without underwear, without food forthemselves, just to get their kids to school and to meet social expectations.

Next time you hear someone say, Oh but I understand what’s happening here, people who get a handout are disincentivised from earning through an honest job, -pull them up on it!

Cuts to welfare in the 1980’s made it a poverty trap for many. And generations are following and suffering from the effect of the poverty trap their parents grew up in. A poverty trap defined by wikipedia, frustratingly describes a situation whereby poor people are discincentivised from earning. FOR GOD’S SAKE!! It’s a poverty trap. Trap means trap. A business can be in a poverty trap. A country can be in a poverty trap. It’s evil to confuse the two.

Look at Africa, they get foreign aid, but doesn’t that just disincentivise them from doing better for themselves?

‘Taxpayer’s money’, is a phrase that suggests that some people are covering for the poor. They’re not. That is an amount of money set aside for common use. The term ‘tax-payer’s money’ is misleading.
It’s everybody’s money. And at the moment it’s being very quickly laundered through the WINZ system, and paid directly to organizations like Housing New Zealand, Private Landowners, and Supermarkets.

Bring it back to the real issue here and that is infrastructure and restoring practicable management and communication to institutions like hospitals, like Winz, and many many other organizations both privatized and government managed.

Reign in this business model of harvesting and accruing wealth for the rich.

Jane Doe is a very well-crafted theatrical work. The Q theatre loft houses it appropriately, as it has a minimalist set: Three microphones and one projection screen and one performer. Karin McCracken holds the stage like a wizard. Clean, careful, nurturing, no I mean reallyvery nurturing of the audience. Precise. Reliable. Friendly.

The subject matter on the other hand is about an experience with what is close to the opposite of all these things. Messy incoherence /drunkenness / messy boundaries, careless unkind and you get the point.

When a violence case gets brought into a legal context, it has this effect of tidying up the facts, collecting them, forensically examining them. The clinical manner in which the people involved talk about bodies, relationships and intent, becomes a particular kind of theatrical show. We’ve seen it on and off screen. It has those dynamic attributes of event and epiphany I’m sure in the real legal world, but there is just more information too. There is more stuff to wade through than is ever used in a tv show, so much more, and there is more legal matter, the business if you like of legality, the formula and the paperwork and the t crossing. Some shuffling, some adjourning. And then you have the legal personnel. And their bodies in the courtroom, their relationships and their intent.

Turning a court case into theatre is no mean feat. I was thoroughly impressed with the simple business in Jane Doe, of clever functional theatrical timing. It meant the play was intriguing, moving, delicately profound and very much advantageous to the causes it pertains to uphold.

The dialogue and phrasing is like the set, minimalistic, and the court drama plays out like a subplot to the series of interview, and the inclusive sharing of details voiced by McCraken in a simulacra against their projected faces. McCracken carries the crowd with a self-assuredness that enables her roles as narrator, and as the everywoman, -Jane Doe, both victimized and typified in the violence acted out against her. The audience are buoyed along in the journey of this play with an emotional allowance that is credit to the teamwork evident in the passage from script to stage. It is softly powerful.This is a short review. I don’t feel the need to wax on, or give any spoilers, I think you should take the opportunity to see it. Maybe not for a first date. But for a brilliant opportunity to open a discussion with those close to you about some simple right and wrong. Also for the catharsis of allowing theatre to speak for you, for those who wish to see all the wrongs righted. And just quietly it’s an incendiary play, that should stay firmly in the canon of theatre quite despite (as well as as well as) its timely themes.

The playwright is Eleanor Bishop and Jane Doe has been selected as well as Julia Croft’s Power Ballad (see my previous review) to go to the Edinburgh Festival. Julia Croft’s other work ‘If there’s no dancing at the revolution I’m not coming’ also runs at the Basement until the 17th of June.

Your support of these three plays will aid in fundraising to get them over there to Edinburgh. And in publicity material I have read that Julia Croft and Eleanor Bishop intend to join forces and create a work together! I would love to see the work that comes from that union of minds. Here we have a small storm of women practitioners in theatre making autonomous provocative exciting work. Zanetti productions are on a roll. Go and see these shows.

Power Ballad, is Julia Croft’s show at the Basement right now, directed and co-created by Nisha Madhan.Amazing the worldwide wave of bare breasted women shouting, in the last few years. Just the same day, I am writing this, (with a sense of urgency because I had to do mothering and shopping for wood first, the entire time with Julia Croft’s performance in my mind, requesting persistently, write about me, write about me… ), I am now writing about her, but on my screen are the images of the nude screaming protesting women in Argentina.in 2016 we saw naked protesting women, using their voices, writing on their bodies, being arrested and posing with mirrors…

In Algiers, this extraordinary video, follows the women who have stripped off clothes and protested all the way to discussions… in one take! In Argentina, women take their shirts off to protest their right to take their shirts off.In France, India, Russia, Mexico, women are taking off their shirts and writing on their bodies and protesting. We as an international collective of people on the net have been writing and reading about why and whether this is a good idea. I am reminded of discussions about feminists versus feminists in the how one should be a feminist genre. Paglia’s recent mean reproach for Madonna comes to mind. How are we as a body? How do we do with or without a penis, with or without a microphone? How are we doing?

You know something that is pressing with me right now this year, is non-linear narrative. Which is quite a different thing from deconstructed language or post structural use of language, or for that matter post structural theatre. But there is one thing they have in common, they never completely deny narrative. They put responsibility for interpretation in the minds of the beholder, they offer you only a glimpse of something, they juxtapose like clashing fractious jarring coincidence, but you cannot make a show and presume that the language of your show is the finite end to it. Post structural language is poetic in this way. It is refractive in the associative processing of its audience. But beyond that there is a common ground again, so post structural language operates way out beyond the stage in the social milieu of its audience in what they know and what they share. Totally random words operate with uncanny resemblance to words that are not random, and the use of a new language then forges narrative journeys for the audience that will not be all the same. Yet the similarities may be profound, they will undoubtedly relate to the key points in the performance that are highlighted possibly by way of their being recognizable outside of the show, and we are of course talking then about zeitgeist. I am not certain that Julia’s show fulfills cognizantly this nature of a post structural (ant-structural) work. It has all the ingredients that I should find very pleasing! Having myself made performance art, noise poetry, a solo show that included deconstructed language, (I made the mistake of greeting a lot of punters afterwards – a chain of vaguely reprimanding comments such as “you should have made it more clear what you were trying to say”). what I am saying here is that this kind of work is out to win my heart, because it encompasses all these things I care very much about, however, I felt that if the entire show was slowed to half speed, I think it would do a better job of winning me over.

The lights down, and up. A woman in a very long wig and tight jeans dances topless with a microphone. The microphone is phallic, but the dance is more pragmatic than sensual. Julia’s body is very athletic, so the way the light contours over her back when she crouches is a particular tenor of display, it’s beautiful, but the glimpse of a beauty in that moment proves hopeful thinking on my part, as the show develops, as I see it, with the potential for authenticity on stage repeatedly disadvantaged by way of purposefully clumsy comic theatrical nuances that distance the persona from narrative, and the audience /persona relationship.

We each have our finite body, and we are together a body, we create individually a body of work, and it becomes part of a certain body of work. The body is at large in power ballad, and the cohesive voice gagged unwelcomingly.

The wide-open mouth which you see in the poster for the show with a microphone stuffed in it is a repeated gestus, either fetishizing, or victimizing or both and the sign outside the theatre warns us of nudity and sexual violence, but in an abstract show, -that leaves us throughout the entire one hour wondering, – which bit is the violence?

I did have the thought during the show that the sexual violence was being committed against us the audience. A decision to push for longer uncomfortable jarring sounds like the, well-amplified scratching of the microphone in hair for example, the writing on concrete with the microphone, and the constant use of said wide open mouth technique, alongside vignettes that summon other characters: Different gendered characters created included a deep voiced character who morphed to become a kind of Sid Vicious type of microphone scream/shouting “Fuck the Patriarchy Fuck the Patriarchy…” repeatedly and loudly. Of course, Sid Vicious really was fucked by the patriarchy, which us leads us back to that question of what is useful in protest, when the audience is the patriarchy you’re protesting against… Because that is going to create a certain lens through which your protest is viewed. And a slightly dead doll looking girl on the floor repeating “I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know”.

There’s a place for repetition. If you’re Laurie Anderson, or John Giorno, that place was in SOHO in the 1970’s or if you have that authentic sense of holding the net very wide to contain the ontological processes of a greater thing than the work you’re doing for your audience. If you just repeat something over and over, because it’s a post structural thing to do, you’re kind of doing it the wrong way. I am really dissecting now to get at the heart.The (longish) interludes of cheesy 80’s style karaoke music clinched the deal for me. I believe a stronger investment in authenticity in every moment, in articulation physically and in theatrical language could bring it through the veil into a place that exists for the audience rather than just in front of it. Yes, I said authenticity, because with the goofy comic element, which sits wrongly in an interesting way I agree, – but it distances from the several characters we are introduced to. It seems to me as though Julia is mocking each one.

By way of narrative we have a structure of the vignettes, I’ve called them characters, Freudian aspects of the one, if you like, but they are all we have, so when it seems that the performer as auteur has no respect for any of those characters to fully inhabit them with her presence on stage but deadens the edges of those –people, by making them artifice, I think, there’s no room to be shy here. I think with the shirt being off (if nothing else, and there’s a debate) reads as ‘no holds barred’, but still there was a reticence. This is a very precise critique I have found my way to! To put concisely the critique, is for me to say I believe with more realism in the heart of an abstracted show, it would carry better as an abstracted show.

The overall effect, trying to read it now as an aural / visual musical score… is one of victimization. Again, through different lenses I am left strongly considering how people view victims of sexual violence. This is a strong theme. And victims of patriarchal violence are silenced by static symbolism, and non-refractive language. It’s the missing vital signs of critical thinking that makes that happen.

I am glad it has had a good reception, and I beg you audiences if you haven’t seen it yet to go and see it you may agree or disagree with me or it and if you are at all interested in word performance or language poetry (there are a few words in it), in women, or in spoken word or noise poetry then you should see this show. This is Julia’s contribution to the discourse. It’s a protest play, it’s brave and awkward and disturbing, I left feeling angered and uncomfortable, and these are of course, valid results when creating an ontological encounter with and between women gender and patriarchy.

Power Ballad runs from the 6th till the 17th of June at the Basement theatre at 6.30 pm.

]]>Mother’s day rant, for grumpy mums to read with their cup of tea?https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/05/10/mothers-day-rant-for-grumpy-mums-to-read-with-their-cup-of-tea/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/05/10/mothers-day-rant-for-grumpy-mums-to-read-with-their-cup-of-tea/#commentsTue, 09 May 2017 18:18:07 +0000http://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=86104

OMG it’s another whole week till Mother’s Day… not only is it a load of blocks, but so many of you are celebrating two weeks and one week early, making it a mother’s month… What a triumph for shopping centres. If they can have a Dad’s month too, an Easter month, a Halloween month, and three months for Christmas, then you’ve got five months of the year when the pressure to purchase is dampened slightly. Oh no scrap that, there’s the kid’s birthday days, Valentine’s day, your daughter’s engagement party, the hubby needs a reminder for anniversary of your wedding…. Oh My God!!

Step away! step away!

Live authentic lives. It has become so tight around here, that I get a funny look if I wear my painty jeans to the super, let alone take a day and do what I want with it. OH THE HORROR! I am currently sitting around writing this in my painty jeans and it’s not Mother’s Day. Actually I am about to go and do some painting.

This weekend I visited the observatory, and we saw an awesome video about asteroids and meteors, and then we saw four of Jupiter’s moons. We learned about Galileo and gravity, and we took photos of John Logan Campbell’s Acacia cottage so we could replicate it in Minecraft, and Finn wrote an excellent story about a horse that breaks free from a cruel master and returns to nature, and mailed it to his kindle so he can turn the pages on his own book. Last weekend we made terrariums and leaned about the properties of activated charcoal and how water systems can exist in a microcosm. #Everydayismothersday

If I drop his lunch in late, the teachers in the school foyer mutter, and cluck… but earlier: “He’s doing so well” and “We’re so proud” … Yeah right. After nine years of mothering teaching parenting forming and shaping my child… You want to pull rank on me and take credit for my child because WHY? Because you’re a school? And I’m a mother? Yep. Pretty much

Sorry but the Mother’s Day concept grew out of recognizing the sacrifice that mothers made for their nuclear families as a historical concept. It’s not appropriate to expect women to sacrifice themselves for the betterment of their husbands and sons any longer, though many married men are grateful that women still do!! So, it’s just a big shopping spree. I think many mothers are despised by their nuclear families for being ‘just a mum’ and not having the power that others have. Sadly, I think some children grow up witnessing the subdued mother, and never actually getting to have a relationship with her as herself, but only as a functionary part of the vehicle of the family. I think this happens. (#not all)

(#Not all) Married mothers are driven bonkers and driven to drink by the sacrifice of their identities in their nuclear families. Women are not expected to not become mothers, but it’s extremely difficult to maintain a career and become a mother as well. (Hashtag Not All married mums, did we get that?). Women like me who don’t stay in marriages for one reason or another, are forced to endure wave after wave of humiliation because of an entrenched judgemental attitude from women who are supported by their marriages. Many of them ignorantly bitchy due perhaps to their sacrifice of independence, and their unhappiness.

Having a Father’s Day as a newer development is a total load of blocks even more so. What? Does that balance things out does it? I don’t think so. Maybe at the cologne counter.

Instead of spending money on perfume and cake and lilies and lemons and tea and lace and linen and dogs and cutlery and dishwasher powder and toenails and trips to tropical islands and while not forgetting that all these gifts will remind married women of their marital obligations to provide sex (and possibly children) in exchange for being taken care of, why don’t you tell your husbands to contribute to one of several charities that are working around the clock to support those other members of your communities and your families to be protected from physically abusive and controlling relationships, and to help them escape those entrapments, and to help them not become vulnerable as a result of escaping.

Here are two organizations that are working overtime to bring attention to this serious problem our country has.

Recently bringing women’s voices to the streets with the “I can’t keep quiet” campaign in time for rape awareness week in May, HELP have been inundated with women calling the centre. They nearly lost their funding entirely a couple of years ago, and continually have to agitate for financial support. A newly formed organization that looks particularly at the stories of women who are working with representation in the family court after separation. They also have been inundated with women obliging the call for registration, and to tell their stories anonymously about their progress towards safety and equilibrium with the family court.

All the emergency support organizations are in dire need of funding. At the very least share the links below and have a look again at the stats:

But the stats! – For example these are stats on those who experience some form of sexual abuse in New Zealand.

And even if it’s not violent abuse or sexual abuse, even if it’s just controlling behaviour, even if it’s death of a spouse, or estrangement, or any other reason, becoming a solo parent means that mother or father is stigmatized by those around them, and just left out, because they can’t join couples as a couple and they don’t get invited.

Their care times interfere with job opportunities, and it’s not always (but sometimes) because they can’t access the childcare, but because they need and want to spend time with their child! Surprise. Parenting under trying circumstances is overwhelming and most likely it’s mothers who will lose their career after a separation, even in cases of shared custody.

If you become a sole parent without income as is often the case for many mums who choose to leave unhappy relationships, the social stigma that ensues is an extravagant waste of energy. The journey through the world of winz is absurd, contradictory, arbitrary, and discouraging of anyone from gaining ground after sole parenting. Disheartening, structurally abusive processes through the Ministry of social development; the family court; the police; the medical system, or the education system, see mothers who are trying to find the support they need, turn back to abusive relationships, or rely on overburdened parents, further stressing families that are trying to progress their own lives.

What is structural abuse?

Structural abuse like this is not the same as abuse by individuals. But it can continue and perpetuate abuse, especially if there is an imbalance between parties financially, or sometimes in ability, language, society or education. Well-meaning individuals can unwittingly contribute to the structural abuse that supports a violent abuser, because they are obliged to follow protocol, or can’t operate outside their specialty area, or because they are misinformed or tricked by the abuser. They can also become misguided because of commonly held prejudice, and judgemental attitudes that have no sensible basis.

A school principal, or a family doctor, a surgeon, or a psychologist, may each feel that they can make a professional judgement on an individual case. But when a parent has had their future sacrificed, their health compromised, their dignity damaged, and their wardrobe and assets diminished, to maintain the energy and presence required for parenting under adverse conditions, then those more well-positioned practitioners, may be more likely to cast aspersions, and to make a biased judgement, or a judgement based on those esoteric belief systems like a meritocracy for example.

A couple of years ago, I had two car accidents, 10 days apart. “Shaken but not stirred”. When I told people, they immediately responded: “You need to slow down”, “Oh the universe is telling you something”, and “You’re attracting that energy”. Bullshit. One guy was accelerating through a stop sign, the other guy was on his phone while he hooned through a red light. But people’s readiness to denounce me as a bad driver or an attractant for bad drivers I expect would fade the more professional I am able to present myself. If I were currently practising as a doctor, or a school principle, or a policeman, when I got hit by a fast moving vehicle, I think they would cast their judgement on the OTHER drivers first.

It’s the same with drinking drugs smoking violent tendencies madness hysteria being stupid education tendency to collect cats and quilting. For the record, I can’t stand quilting. I don’t smoke anything or do drugs of any kind as it happens, but people will assume that I do. Because I am a mother without a husband.

People will assume that they should help me with useful advice about how to parent. Cheese is swept. The school teachers at my son’s school will presume that his abilities have been entirely developed and nurtured by them. They will send me a message saying, “Your son has been late 11% of the year and this will affect his learning” This will cross in the ether with my message that says, “you have failed every consecutive year to attend to my son’s ability in class and I have had to step in and re-direct his learning at school every year since he was five because your teachers are prioritizing fitting in to their own class methods over actually assessing prior knowledge capably, so we are taking the morning off once again to treat nits because you have also failed to do anything about it, and tomorrow we’re going to take the whole day off so that he can come to Bunnings with me because we’re going to talk about interesting things on the way like molten lava”.

Recently a well-meaning school parent saw me reading a book outside a cafe. I was actually trying to relax as the last several weeks, (years) of my life have been so stressful, “This is what it’s like to have only one child” she said to her friend…

She’s nice, she’s a lovely friendly woman and she wanted to celebrate my difference, and accentuate her own industry and desire to read a book in the sun.

I had to tell her, my personal situation has prevented me from having more children. It wasn’t something I chose. I wanted (despite the odds), to try and make a loving family unit with loads of children.

Many people feel compelled to perceive something different. In fact, many people have this entrenched belief that you get what you want. One gets what one wants. So they think that everyone they see, has got what they wanted. Some people have an entrenched belief that everyone gets what they deserve. Where do they get these flamboyant esoteric ideas? As I mentioned earlier some go as far as to tell me that they believe that if you have an accident or get ill, that you’ve brought that on yourself! This always strikes me as extraordinary, this belief in positivism as a magical force over matter seems to have replaced a fundamental belief in God or gods as a contractual relationship, in that if you’ve signed up, you will be protected. It’s an old-fashioned thing but still seems to work. In ancient rituals, worldwide, for the betterment of society human sacrifices were made. I remember reading an account of one young woman’s body that was somehow preserved, and a study of her entrails provided examples showing she was drugged before death in a sacrifice ritual. Joseph Campbell believed the community’s interest in the sacrifice (to loosely deliver his findings), was to serve as a kind of reminder that death comes to us all, and thereby, a reminder of our place in life, to be humble and compliant and less ambitious. ” Eat drink and be merry”, and “let us eat and drink for tomorrow we shall die”, from the bible (Ecclesiastes, and Isiah, respectively), are only a step away from the essential message of the same practice. Personally, I prefer “live well and prosper”. which a quick google search teaches me originates beyond the Vulcan salute, in the Hebrew phrase: ‘Shalom Alacheim’, which like the Arabic phrase ‘Salaam Alaykum’, translates as “Peace be on you”.

Peace is great. I like the idea. It’s not a new idea to me, but it’s a good one. But in modern society, for some crazy reason rocking the boat and fighting for peace have become one and the same. However it is that babies arrive, we are at least universally aware, that peace is a requirement by which to mother a child. Peace, mothering and babies being born – there is no separating these things, there’s just no debate. (Can I plead old-fashionedness for just a minute and leave cryogenics, and embryo development in the lab for a different day?)

Mothering or nurturing of our infants, is the most important part of our entire society’s development.

Mothering shapes us all as individuals.

Mothering comes first. *

I’m talking about the judgement of mothers, the preconceptions about mothering, and the control over mothers by using their children as levy for ransom of their sacrifice. What sacrifice?

Ask them.

My husband’s not like that?

Ask him to donate to abuse charities then.

I’m not like that?

Good. Start helping others not to be like that too.

We’ve had enough of flimsy shopping day talcum powder totems and being told to stay in bed, and we’ve had enough of being sacrificed thanks.

LIVE WELL AND PROSPER! and here’s something to ponder: If there are two objects of different mass unobstructed in space within the earth’s gravitational pull, on what does the effect of gravity on the velocity of the objects depend?

The Women’s Centrehttp://awc.org.nz*(If Dads are stepping in to provide the familial parent care and nurture of a child from that child’s earliest days, then what they are doing as far as our language still allows it, is mothering. And it’s less common, so don’t get me started on semantic exactitude, I’m being inclusive here).

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/05/10/mothers-day-rant-for-grumpy-mums-to-read-with-their-cup-of-tea/feed/7This is the most horrifying thing I have seen in the media so far, this year in the context of all that is happening with education & the militaryhttps://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/04/12/this-is-the-most-horrifying-thing-i-have-seen-in-the-media-so-far-this-year-in-the-context-of-all-that-is-happening-with-education-the-military/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/04/12/this-is-the-most-horrifying-thing-i-have-seen-in-the-media-so-far-this-year-in-the-context-of-all-that-is-happening-with-education-the-military/#commentsTue, 11 Apr 2017 22:24:50 +0000http://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=84852The Manawatu standard shows us Whakarongo School students proudly holding their military assault rifles….Hang on, I spoke too soon. Hekia Parata’s disturbingly named ‘Future Risk Index’ has been announced a day after I wrote the following. This is equally as disturbing, and for exactly the same reason.

Parata says, by the way, that data-identified students will have their identity ‘protected’ but from whom? They will secretly be identified in certain ways that will not be divulged, and what about the effect of those data findings further into the future? The horrible suggestion is that under our current government there is a system in place that operates with this secret eugenics based re-designing of school facilities, they’re just doing it without the data.

This means the ministry of education is exacting eugenics based procedure in the education system without telling us. To do this knowingly and openly is the act of a totalitarian state, because in any other kind of state the people would not allow it. So they are doing it secretly, and sharing their intention to install a secret ‘Future Risk Index’ is rather an indictment on what they are doing right now.

There is a wave of militarization that has been breaking over us for some time, but horrifyingly events seem to be pointing that way at a quickening pace.

Bill English annexed four and a half billion dollars for technology and announced it at a conference in 2012 I think, describing his government as an “Inside-Out Government”. The following year I went and did a dip-grad in education to try to get a look at what that meant for education.

What it meant is that the education hub Corewas leading the way in promoting the SNUPping or standardizing of all schools’ intranet systems. That is to say they were subsidizing the installation of ultra fast broadband copper, to pave the way for e-learning in schools. The benefits were touted as the common access to quality education as provided across the board using the best of what internet learning has to offer.

It also means data collection and data analysis from children who are being encouraged to use devices in class, from primary and in some cases as early as kindergarten.

At my local school, the year 5 and six class, for the first time has compulsory BYOD use in the classroom.

My son is presently reading a series that he likes that someone else (not the school) has provided him about a 14-year-old who is also a spy for the MI6. In this way, the school facilitates a further distancing between my child’s parents’ parenting. And between either of us and him. Luckily, I have brought him up thus far with his entire repertoire of literature and have been able to influence him accordingly to become a critical and autonomous thinker.

This is not to be writing about my child so much as to portray the unexpected consequences of taking BYOD into classrooms. In this case, we are separated parents with a very different outlook on the military. I introduce him on a natural gradient to be able to understand and negotiate his way around matters of moral dilemma or to negotiate big issues in life as they arise.

The device distances him and also gives an autonomy that neither of his parents are in agreement about.

I have more to say on tech in schools, the good the bad and the very ugly potential pitfalls of it, let’s just say broach the channels of ethical dilemma that are still taboo for the mainstream. And I will come back to this, but my major concerns are in the implications of arbitrary management of data to suit a particular purpose or prejudice… where was it that Key said, to paraphrase, “we manipulate data to suit our purpose”?And also most unnervingly the way our schools are placed in a rainbow of affluence and how this informs the emergent amalgams of technology and its effect on the schools. It’s certainly not always the case that less wealthy schools will have less technology, because it’s the new wave, and schools (and their boards) are not wanting to miss out. The investment in technology is similar but the investment in applying technology and the teaching around it is not. i.e. investing in teachers.

To assimilate tech learning into schools requires careful planning and wealthy schools are able to try out various forms of this, and manage tech as a ratio to non-tech activities in the classroom, and to employ teachers who are implementing schooling around the use of tech, meaning interdisciplinary thinking, tech as an inroad to becoming auteur when presenting work on geography for example. Tech for interacting with other students, and for building new thinking that comes back into the classroom.

Other schools are operating on a 1:1 basis (One student to one computer for all their work) and trying out models of rotating teachers around the same learning hubs. The implications are sinister for the learning outcomes for young people in less affluent classrooms. The learning I predict is more likely to be content based, and to stem directly from hubs like Core, and Telco Tech Services, Theresa Gattung’s new outfit, replacing quality teaching with regurgitative information. And where is this content coming from? Who is creating it? Without any quality control, concepts of religious education, racist anthropology, anti-immigration, eugenics, scientific evidence around global warming, – I know for a fact are all issues that will be skimmed over in a dull tech contained environment of linear retained learning. Because it’s assumed there is no outside monitoring likely by parents of lower socio-economic students, and certainly no easy grounds for comparison with the rest of the class, I predict those students will be left easy prey to be cordoned away from the same goals and aspirations as their richer neighbouring schools.

Whereas some school libraries are already operating as learning hubs, others are developing major shifts towards making learning spaces that look at least in the diagrams I have seen from CORE, like corporate rec’ rooms, where the students are tapped in to their devices and headphones and able to sit and roam, and dangle upside down while they work if they like.

It makes a great picture, but the emphasis for schools in the lower socio economic bracket is cost cutting, and letting the online content speak for itself.

There is no equivalent spread of concern for the learning outcomes and the social adaptation of students who are sadly going to be more often left to their own devices than have teachers and other students influencing their creative inquiry into why how and where they should be learning to use tech. And there are more issues such as addiction, and radioactivity, the sedentary tendency of tech learning, and the anti-social aspect, and the list goes on.

Combine this with data collection, (and that means banks and banks of assessment data that staff can approach as a vast interface and use to interpret in a number of different ways), and you start to see the patterns emerge for the future schooling of dystopian fiction coming to bear in our foreseeable future, should it be exposed to a new ethical code that differs from the one we are juggling right now. The general public and parents won’t easily be able to access let alone assess the data so they won’t know if they disagree with it. But I can tell you now a lot of it will not reliably address the evidence that will be claimed. Linking lateness for example with a jail term for a relative, does not have a bearing on that child’s ability to become the prime minister should they be given equal opportunity.

Last year the announcement was made that there would be a large financial investment by the government, this time in the military. What are we seeing from the military as a result?

Do you remember who said to John Key who was smiling like a schoolboy at the time, “We don’t have to ask”? The American military, didn’t have to bother asking Key if New Zealand would support them.

It would not surprise me if there are some people thinking that it would be a good time to stage a benevolent presence of the military in schools around New Zealand right now, to ease public perception up a little. And some might think, like the writer of the Manawatu article has said, rural kids are aware of gun use and their families might not find it so strange. But these are not rural guns. These really are not. You might aim it the same way as you point a .22 at a pepsi can but the army are here in your school chatting and relating to the kids. The army. They weren’t there last week. They weren’t there last year, or the year before that.

Well it has chilled me to the bone to see this happen today. Behind the façade there is a disgusting parallel to be made here.

While we are witnessing the death of millions in Syria and millions more around the world, and the images of dying children are being bandied about and while we are alarmed and indignant and looking for some answers, here is a picture of the army putting military grade assault rifles into the hands of our children.

We don’t do this. We don’t militarize our children. We don’t do it slowly. We don’t do it fast. Not casually, not formally. Certainly, not without changing the ethical social templates by which we have operated to date.

The attacks on civilians around the world are horrifying. It is not going to help anyone’s future to pass it off as collateral damage. Certainly, citizens are killed in wartime, and that has always happened, but what is horrifying is the climate ambivalence in the public milieu.

That ambivalence should be countered by education and inquiry-led learning and critical thinking.

While we haven’t even got our act together to manage how our children learn to think, as they are deluged by the business led model of implemented technology, it is not appropriate to then allow the military to play friendly soldiers to the public by way of our children. Because the unexpected results are going to be dehumanizing with a human face.

Right now we have a refusal in Parliament to attend to an overhaul of draconian legislation around women’s abortion issues. Making young women reconsider their life-choices by forcing them through a process in which they must prove mental distress in order to get permission to have a procedure done, is cruel and sadistic. Similarly, so, if they are going through the public system and they must wait until they are twelve weeks pregnant before a procedure no matter their age. If you want to understand why abortion is a procedure that protects women in New Zealand, you can have a look at Margaret Sparrow’s two books that document the stories of abortion: Then & Now, – between 1940 and 1980, and Rough on Women, -the 19th Century. I find it highly unsavory that the government has not yet been able to address updating the legislation that would allow women and girls to have safer, more dignified abortion procedures done, and instead leaves them in an old fashioned judgmental and cruel process that effectively accuses them of doing something that goes against the essential structure of the moral code of society, the effect of which is potentially damaging in itself. The government needs to get its priorities straight. And the New Zealand public probably needs to get a little more clued up with what’s going on in the world by at least not believing everything the government tells you any more if you haven’t worked out some of the Machiavellian technique already. Oppressing and attacking women’s health, well-being, and freedoms in New Zealand, is still being dragged along in a tide of old fashioned misguided ideals that put men first and women sanctimoniously in a picture frame with the baby… the structural ongoing war against women.

But where are those ideals when it comes to shooting the baby out of the frame in other people’s households? Or just shooting the whole family, and burning their houses and books to aggravate them so they’ll retaliate.

While some other countries are making us feel like they’re dragging the world back into the dark ages, and a quick look at the news will have you doing a quick update on your resilience to trauma, it might seem like the end of an era for freedom of speech. But for the Catholic church-goers protesting in a month long vigil for which they have provided “training” on Dominion road it’s time to get out there and try to turn around the pathways of women who are trying to sort out their life pathways. I have a message for those anti-abortionists who are praying for “the education” of women to deliver them from evil. Go and get yourselves an education first and leave those poor women alone. Perhaps take a quick look at the litany of child abuse sagas in Diocese of the Catholic diaspora, it doesn’t take much education to unearth the hypocrisy around abuse. But when it is time to have some conversations around structural abuse, and structural entrapment? When will we please stop pathologizing women and requiring them to submit to a hegemonic doctrine before looking logically and clearly at what is a simple case of healing repairing enabling and empowering women by clearing up some very ancient problematic legislation. We do not live in the middle ages, it is not enough to ignore societal ills for which parliamentarians are supposed to take responsibility and point the finger at the mental health of women who are in a social or structural entrapment. Please do add your voice to this cause in whichever way you are most positioned to do so. I strongly believe that the prohibitive abortion legislation exists and a part of the machinery that disables progressive government in its wider context.

Tim Fountain’s writing of Quentin Crisp in real time, in his apartment in his elderly years, is an excellent play of cadence and a gentle foray into the privacy of a man who was so generous and brave with his privacy, that it is difficult now to remember that he was born in 1908.

Resident Alien paints a portrait of its audience as one of many visitors to Crisp’s New York apartment, where as a man in his nineties, he reminisces, and confides, entertains, and dallies in conversation with love and fame and happiness, how to manage their arrival, and their retreat.

Roy Ward inhabits Crisps body with ease, and allows us the privilege of an evening with Quentin, which is a subtle and gentle display of his character. It’s hard not imagine that Crisp himself as a younger man would be horrified that a theatre crowd should follow him into his apartment at ninety! In the play, we are offered a sense of both the resigned older gentleman, with a mirthsome disdain for the world around him, and a feigned attachment to his isolation, which gives way to a volatile fluctuation of the heart. In beautifully rendered moments, Ward brings Quentin into reprisals of courageous emphasis that have the old gentlemen transported into himselves of the past. Passages that work well, and phrases that are quotable are delivered with a mesmerizing certainty as they well up out of a meandering monologue that has uncertainty as its canvas.

I saw this show, as a benefit concert and there were several politicians in the audience. How perfectly apt to hear Crisp’s notes on politics and politicians, delivered defiantly from the man beyond his grave via his legacy. Speaking to Roy Ward afterwards, Roy comments, “his politics were all over the place”. We will all recognize the moment when we are listening respectfully to an older acquaintance when they vehemently say something you find politically atrocious! But in these audacious provocateur statements, there are some universal wisdoms that will not let you leave without a lot of respect for Mr. Crisp. Roy Ward’s performance is a superb job in articulating the emotional tenor of Crisp’s being, swallowing away the suggestion of emotion as it arises, upholding a dignity of pride and endeavor. I suspect Roy doesn’t hit the peaks of Crisps acerbic nature which is a choice, though I see Crisp as a softer version of himself as he aged. In fact, the dignity of pride and endeavor is something that I am left with a stronger sense of. In his performance of Resident Alien, Ward shows something of the sacrifice Crisp took on in his courage as a younger man, and that translates into a pride and endeavor that others have carried since with more ease, but perhaps never any more with the same sense of individual style as protest at least not to the same extent by the juxtaposition of who Crisp was, and the background of society against which he contextualized himself. He was really a star for the balancing act of his life. Getting a glimpse through personal insights into how men and women performed in 1926 is always a delight! I was always so thrilled to hear bits and pieces from my grandparents and my great-grandmother about that time as a child. If you go to the internet and find Quentin Crisp’s books and view him in interview, as I hope you do, he looks pretty much the same in 1975 as he does subsequently. But strong. Enduringly strong. Go and see this play while you can. It’s a lot like getting to hang out with Crisp before he goes. He certainly has his wits about him, and he is very funny and clever, and he would love to have you I’m sure. Just ring from the corner phone box beforehand.

Resident Alien
Completes a season at Basement theatre,
6.30 pm
Until the 1st April

Poetry has been everything you didn’t expect it to be for a pretty long time now, and Shane Hollands has been putting this to effect in the inner literary worlds of this city for the length and breadth of that time. In fact when he reaches into the depths of 50’s American beat poets for his inspiration, navigating Tom Waits’s bar stool, and skirting Burroughs, on the move, kinda upfront and personal with Bukowski (it’s almost like Shane has a google app to look in through the windows of these figures, as though he’s been up off the mattress kicked a whiskey bottle to the side and risking being cuffed across the brow peeked over Bukowski’s shoulder to see if the poem is about the woman he hoped it was about… )you can almost endow Hollands with an extra half decade of poetic history. Although for Shane the landscape of the New Zealand highway replaces the old 66 and the Louisiana state Highway.

As in his poem ‘Fear and Loathing leaving Rotovegas’:

“…where are you going ? she says

she lilts

she screams

I say I’m going down to Motueka…”

‘the atomic composition of the seeming solid’ is an amalgam, A New Zealand Anthem to the sense of righteous transgressive alternatives to being that the fifties American beat poets provided, their post WW2 assertion to establish other ways of being around coffee houses, alternate states, traveling, risk, love, sex and jazz, contrary to the conservatism that melted across American states like a General Motors’ golden lacquer. The book pulls up an accountability to a contemporary politic here in New Zealand, or anywhere we have a view of America, particularly in relation to our ability to transgress social expectations and norms around behavior and literature. What are you allowed to do with your words? Your body? Are you allowed to travel if you don’t have a car?

“ I’m sitting on top of the boat

having a smoke

keeping my eye on the punks

thinking about my wallet

thinking bout my licence

my ID…”

Shane’s work may host amalgams from history, a namedrop of influences that are on an even par with lovers but it is deeply embossed with New Zealand culture, a casual kiwi vernacular that belies the very upfront and honest confessional: That of lies. In fact lies are mentioned frequently, a play with honesty and the reader’s expectations, the works endearingly are coy, and will have you reading with your lie detector on. But it also brings the stories to the fore, Shane is a great storyteller, a purveyor of the lived fiction.

So it is fitting that a book launch to celebrate a new collection of works should be all the things you might not expect from a book launch. There is no staid or quiet paper shuffling under the disco balls at the dog’s Bollix where we witness Shane’s band Freaky Meat who deliver a tight set of super cool and an array of the poets who exceed and dodge poetry expectations in this way. I was pleased to be included in the line-up, and along with Fats white, Caitlin Smith, Miriam Larsen Barr, Sally Louise, Simone Kaho, Murray Haddow, we brought in this book. Now I’m not reviewing them just at the moment, but here is a stalwart of talent, Caitlin surprises by performing her poems as a new foray into previously untapped mines, Fats does a couple of standards including playing the Ukulele behind his back, but then does a beautiful sweet number that works a lullaby charm, Murray has a repertoire of comical and rude pieces, at which he is virtuoso at presenting, his top speed racing commentary poem is rude enough to repel but too funny to stop listening to. Miriam has reinstated her publishing house ‘The Back Shed Press’ for this book and as her husband and also very talented writer Daniel Larsen-Barr explains, there is now a future slate for works coming through it. Sally was still performing as I left to take a culturally piqued 9 year old home to bed, when I looked back she was holding the crowd with an olde world stage show quality that redeems all of our tech addictions, and Simone Kaho was yet to take the stage.

As it happens Simone who has also just published a collection, will be touring the country with Shane to follow this gig, and shall I just say, we the poetry whanau in Auckland send them to you with our love, please do catch them as they pass through your town, for a bit of that avant garde state of the nation road trip flavor in your life. And Pick Up a copy of their books ‘the atomic composition of the seeming solid’, at the door.

Te Ao Maori puts a new tale into the New Zealand Maori literature canon on stage in the Festival this season.

I am old enough to remember sitting in the audience of theatre shows around Auckland thinking that I would put a Maori Othello on stage, that I would make a Polynesian prime minister in a modern Merchant of Venice set in the South seas, that I would make movies with lots of swearing in amongst the kiwi vernacular, and that I would make domestic violence into palatable provocative and clever stories to bring light to these stories. In short I wanted to change the world. We forget how recently these things were not there. I can’t tell you how reassuring it was over the last twenty-five years to recognize that I am not alone and never was. Of course as a teenager, watching a white Othello was cringe-worthy and I was determined to help in whatever way I could, -it was just before –just surfing the wave of the rise of Maori writers and directors and the reclaiming of storytelling by practitioners who must have felt the cringe deeply as they were also witness to the mise-en-scene in New Zealand theatre, as recently as the late eighties / early nineties.I’m not forgetting the Maori playwrights and practitioners of that era and earlier, I really don’t, but I am referring to an interweaving of audience, and acceptance and a mainstreaming of story content, directorship, and the width and breadth of the environment for cultivating Maori and Polynesian storytelling that we have now across media in New Zealand and I’m just acknowledging that it owes it’s capacity to its forbears in theatre. Long gone are the days when every mention of Tipuna had to be accompanied by a lime green lighting state and the sound of a Purerehua through the sound system. But this too is a literary forbear of much in Maori theatre. Maori do not come to tell story without bringing their tipuna and their stories with them. And our countries theatre history is a couple of thousand years richer for it. I am well aware how that sounds, this is a pakeha gaze review and that will continue to exist as well, but we are melding audience and as someone who has been wanting this to happen for a life time I am thrilled to see Cellfish combining hilarious and clever stagecraft, controversial and unprecedented content and the power of a female lead in a show that touches on death revenge and incarceration paralleling a contemporary Maori condition with the melodrama of a vengeful Lady Macbeth or a Duped Othello. Ok Ok the review. Mark Ruka and Miriama McDowell shine playing the medley of characters that have been expertly crafted into the story of Cellfish. Hilarious and unnerving at times, the play endears us and warns us against loving too hard or too little, it’s characters. The summoned dream sequences with a deftly spun layering of realism, lean into mythologies both from here and from England’s Scotland.

Ultimately as should be expected these forms meet, and crucially too as you will find out. While this is a sophisticated script, full of complex plot potentials as it unfolds, teachers will find this a brilliant play for school trips as it is so very accessible to those students who’s ears will prick up at such lines as “ This is for Pakehas Miss!” But the written work of this play is a poetic triumph of lyrical interwoven ideas. Its brings together a local cadence with shakespearian authority. In their potentiality many moments have separate meanings lending an air of classical mystery to the story development. As I walked away I was discussing the meaning of a pivotal scene as I first thought it, and later as I realized it was…

I expect plenty to be written about this show, so for now I will just offer my congratulations to all involved, Mark and Miriama are highly watchable throughout, and in writing Miriama, Jason Te Kare, and Rob Mokaraka have clearly got a great group dynamic going on. Jason Te Kare’s direction is refined, and the show is a rare fully fledged drama that make a departure through time and space and returns to strip back the walls of the contentious issues of domestic violence, Urban Maori in New Zealand Jails, Utu, and Aroha, and asks ‘How do we go on from here?’ I hope this play remains a stepping stone towards the next twenty five years progress in these domains, and again to see theatre playing it’s social role so well, is a treat.

I wish I had recorded the long conversation I had this morning with an old acquaintance in the performance industry who was following my thread on face-book about feminism, and felt moved to give me a call. He is a comedian.

He seemed to be making a concerted effort to be congenial, and he tells me that he has a degree in politics and that he gets a lot of flak from people who attack him when he talks about issues like this. He wants to talk about the need to start again, – to refresh and for me to not be an angry left extremist.

The first time I met this person, he understood that I was a poet. It was in the bar Bodega in the 90’s once. “I’ll tell you a poem he said, and you tell me a joke”.

“Alright”, I said swigging on a beer, “fair deal”.

So he put his hand on the underneath part of my inner thigh and held it there, and looked at me and said: “Now”.

Without flinching, I leaned closer to his ear and said: “Gag”.

He removed his hand and we never really got matey after that. For many of my relationships with guys, sadly that is as good as it’s going to get. Because the impetus to forge a relationship of any kind in the first instance had to subjugate a power of some kind that was outside of my intention. In plain speak, because he felt that I might not like him, he thought he’d do something invasive, thus confirming that I wouldn’t like him. I am always open though to bettering communication with our tane, and I have always had loads of excellent men friends who are astute communicators and feminists, and have political nouse. But there are always those ones who put up the divide. That all operates on a spectrum.Cut to twenty years later, and this person has rung me for a phone conversation. He is part of a flurry of men friends and acquaintances who are contacting me online and on the phone, to talk about feminism. Because I said I am a feminist. On facebook. Because I mocked Paula Bennet for sometimes being a feminist, and Bill English for saying he didn’t really know what that means. Most of the men and women contacting me are saying that they are also feminists.

That’s basically the gist of it, and this guy on the phone seems to be congenial but his words do not follow a very thorough logic. “Extreme lefties are nutcases” He spills over, “They’re mentally ill” “They just want to attack attack attack without listening. I think what has happened, is that Trump has allowed men to finally feel empowered enough to actually talk about this kind of thing. You know I think that if I was in America, I would have voted for Trump, weird aye?” and “I would prefer a word like humanism. To Feminism. Because it’s not divisive…” and so he went on.

“Women want equality? -they’ve got it. They’ve already got it.”

The most important response to this is that, well, we are feminists in a universal sense. Within feminism there are factions, and differing ideologies, but we are still feminists under a simple term with a definition. There might be a greater level of fiscal equality in some parts of society, but not in others. There may be a great progress in some facets of life in this country, but not in another country. The ignorance or rather resilience against learning in this regard is astounding. We have horrifying abuse stats let alone fiscal inequality. I have seen a young Polynesian girl in Queen street giving prices to a prospective client aged about 13, I’ve seen that myself. I have seen women broken by expectations that they should be able to cope on a benefit and manage a court case while working full time and try to win their infant child back that has been taken from them on false grounds. YES I HEAR YOU MENS RIGHTS GROUPS. There are stories of abuse of men as well, but at the moment we are talking about women, and the point I am making is that as women we are experiencing it beyond and inside the stats. I have intervened in assault, rape and helped women who are suffering financial entrapment. This is not because I have some kind of women-in-trouble magnet, this is the truth of the women I know, unless they come from quite cloistered backgrounds. My flatmate was attacked last year, another friend is escaping a violent marriage, this just touches the surface, and these are just the recent ones that have touched on my life unexpectedly.

“I’m a stats man” he says.

Yes the stats. Yes you can collect data and reform it and manipulate it, and like politics there is not one simple gradient by which you can measure the abuse stats of men against women, it fluxes and shifts according to data by which you measure it. But instead there is a gender gradient for different contexts, and there are many threads to the political gradients also in different contexts. Also feminism applies to enabling minority groups and enforcing rational egalitarian politics around infrastructure so the stats are rather ‘us and them’ for want of a better term to describe it.

Extremism can apply to fiscal matters; education; the workplace; the military, so you can exist with a whole bunch of different left to right wing positions on a gradient you see? Same for gender. It’s about the context and the issues that are in question.

Quantifiable data, all rotates around abuse. Abuse is also existent in unquantifiable forms. Waging a battle about whether men are abused or not is a very real interest, but it’s not feminism. Feminism does not negate the interests of men who are abused and hurt by women or men or the state.

When we say we are feminist, we are thinking of others not only ourselves. We are thinking of men, women, children abusers and abused. We are thinking of human-trafficking, murder and solo parenting, sexual abuse and structural abuse, and wealth inequality and warfare and we are fully aware that in having all these discussions that there is something dreadfully wrong with this picture.

Abuse is not selective, but it relates to power structures, and power structures relate to gender discrepancies. We are all in this together, and we are trying to change the world for the better. So we must be always looking to learn more around complexities of language. I believe that we must dedicate ourselves to learning, and as adults to protecting learning. Children need to learn to work consistently with a critical approach. They need to learn to reason. I personally believe that teaching about prejudice belongs in year 5 and 6 education. It’s not about taking sides. It’s about reasoned inquiry.

The word feminism is fine. There is nothing wrong with it. There’s no reason for anyone to try to sway language and change the word because they think feminism hasn’t worked. The arrogance of simply deciding that the word should be put out of use is astounding! Yes, feminism may carry quite different connotations to different people. Feminists may disagree with each other and they may even vehemently deny others the title, like ‘Democrats’ or ‘Christians’ or ‘Journalists’, these umbrella terms will always hold factions within. It doesn’t mean that we should get rid of the word democracy, because it’s “not working”!

The language that another face-book friend has used in response to my status update gives a perfect insight to the mentality of some people who are layering and associating feminism with other fear related meanings, (albeit usually hidden, or suppressed). The meaning of the word feminism is to do with equal rights. That women should be paid the same, respected the same, and afforded the same other rights as men under the same circumstances.

I quote my friend here, who seems to think feminism represents an “evil” threat that “demonizes good men” and the espousing of feminism akin to “forc(ing) someone else to be on your platform” which is “a form of rape” believing that you are “a gender” and “not a soul” and please note my friend otherwise agrees with me that we need to move forward progressively without division.

Unbelievably this language is suggestive of some of the religious devilish accusations cast against witches hunted and burned in the 17th century. That the simple mention of the word feminist should trigger these accusations and hysterical descriptions is astonishing and a little alarming to me.

We are not in the 17th century. The sirens and succubae are in the art gallery and history books, and women are not trying to hurt men by declaring feminism. They really are not. So we must attend to that simple thing… where is the division coming from. Where? Who? Are we in agreeance that we should operate by focusing on context and issues, with less division? well yes. If we have a social conscience, yes.

At first I was suspicious of Bill English throwing this word out to the dogs to let them have a really good divisive worry about it. But now that I am recognizing a contemporary milieu in which men are feeling loudly able to talk about their feelings (possibly thanks to Trump as was suggested), I think I would like to congratulate Bill English for being honest. For bravely giving a very honest answer. (It’s not to do with finances after all). And it turns out that many people like him did not, (at least a couple of days ago) actually know what feminism means. It turns out that the prime minister and his deputy may be representing thousands upon thousands of New Zealanders who also didn’t know what it meant, and were too afraid to ask a dictionary. Like Professor Lupin’s Boggart that becomes your deepest fear when it is released from its box, English may have thought Feminism was an apparition in hob nail boots and flourishing a bill of rights with a ballpoint and unpresidented glee. Now however, with love, and a great desire to foster better and less fractious communication between all genders and all political parties and all countries and cultures and especially in time for Christmas between all the members of my own family, we can all know what feminism is, by eliminating all that it is not, and just looking at its definition:

The advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.

Sure, you should still have lots of conversations about what to do about it, and how best to further a humanist interest in advancing personal learning international diplomacy and in navigating the media, but as all the men who are so quick to contact me all strongly point out, they want to be advocate to women’s wellbeing and don’t want to be divisive and aggressive, and they don’t want to hold an extremist view without a substantial rational philosophy, and to just attack attack attack…

So I think I can conclude that we’re all in agreeance. Of course I would love to hear some of our very public people saying so. Happy Christmas.